Instructions On How To Write Badly

Insert descriptions that may detract from the ongoing story:

Gripping her brand new brown coloured Luis Vuitton bag tightly, Nandita rushed out of her three bedroom Alaknanda flat, banging the newly polished mahogany front door loudly…

Write as you speak:

‘”She wasn’t there at home, it’ll be later when I’m going to call”

Punctuation is for idiots:

Each night you stay at our world famous spa at the fully published rate you will be entitled to a special discount at our fine dining Indian restaurant The Santoor.

Describe every character in minute detail:

Ram shifted his weight, the weight he had steadily gained over the last five years on a steady diet of dark chocolates and whiskey and which showed no sign of diminishing, while he soaked his tired and aching feet in a tub of lukewarm water. His feet had always been a source of irritation to him, imbued as they were with a mysterious capacity to ache at odd and unrelated times. The aches and pains were not new and were not related to his weight gain. This had been the case since the age of about 15 when his father had bought him his first pair of black formal shoes from Gata. Within a week, he had callouses and the aches had begun.

Suddenly the front door opened and his wife Monica, who was the Vice President of Client Servicing at XYZ Advertising in charge of the prestigious Calorie Cola account, walked in wearing her black patent leather stilettos.

Use buzzwords like ‘teamwork’, ‘validate’, paradigm’ and ‘focus’ wherever possible:

“analysis and validation of support strategies for customer satisfaction parameters”

Buzzwords are especially good when writing mission statements…

Always use adverbs even when they are not necessary:

Joseph Little’s new book is truly unique.

Authors you should read:

Danielle Steel:

“She wore a dress the same color as her eyes her father brought her from San Francisco” – Star

Stephen King:

“Even before the deal with Straker had been consummated (that’s some word all right, he thought, and his eyes crawled over the front of his secretary’s blouse), Lawrence Crockett was, without doubt, the richest man in ‘Salem’s Lot and one of the richest in Cumberland County, although there was nothing about his office or his person to indicate it.” – Salem’s Lot

Dean Koontz:

“Eighteen years ago, on the night of her eighth birthday, in a seaside cottage on Key West, Chyna had squirmed under her bed to hide from Jim Woltz, her mother’s friend. A storm had been raging from the Gulf of Mexico, and the sky-blistering lightning had made her fearful of scaping to the sanctuary of the beach where she’d retreated on other nights. After committing herself to the cramped space under that iron bed, which had been lower slung that this one, she had discovered that she was sharing it with a palmetto beetle. Palmettos were not as exotic or as pretty as their name. In fact, they were nothing more than enormous tropical cockroaches.” – Intensity

Barbara Taylor Bradford:

“An ineffable tranquility hovered over the villa, was broken only occasionally by the intermittent sounds of the staff going about their duties: the whirr of the vacuum, the faint birdlike chirpings of the maids as they dusted adjacent rooms, the echo of the butler´s brisk tones issuing orders, the click of a door closing, the patter of distant busy feet. Gradually these individual noises were beginning to merge, flowed together to create a vague and muffled hum that hardly intruded at all on her gentle peregrinations through the labyrinth of her mind.” – Voice of the Heart

[For more examples of fantastic writing, go to The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest website]

I am the author of these examples…I didn’t have to try hard writing them as bad writing comes naturally to me, but I am a good reader and these are some of the things I don’t like reading…